“Thought…is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately…no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”
The Human Condition ch. 45 (1958)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, women's history
“(1911-1979) American poet. Bishop’s first book of poems was North and South (1946). In 1955 she reissued that book with A Cold Spring; the double volume was awarded the 1956 Pulitizer Prize for poetry. Bishop had close friendships with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell; her work shares precision with the former and personal warmth with the latter. Her poems are written in a modern idiom with great stylistic subtlety. While she knew many of the confessional poets, she wrote about her own life with irony, humor, and detachment. Her Complete Poems (1969) won the National Book Award in 1970. Geography III (1977), a ten-poem picture of her life, seen through places she remembers, is meditative, but vivid, spare almost to the point of austerity. Bishop was an avid traveler, living in many parts of the world, including Brazil, where she lived with Lota de Macedo Soares for almost two decades. Bishop returned to the U.S. after Soares’ suicide. The end of Bishop’s life was darkened by ill health and alcoholism, which had long plagued her. Bishop was considered by many a “poet’s poet,” but her deceptively simple style carries with it an undercurrent of tenderness that also touches less-sophisticated readers. Bishop also wrote a number of travel books, including Questions of Travel (1965) and Brazil (1967). One Art: Selected Letters (1993) is a large selection of an ever more voluminous and interesting correspondence.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“A gloomy tale. The author tries to lighten it with humor, but unfortunately her idea of humor is almost exclusively variations on the pratfall…Neither satire not humor is achieved.”
Saturday Review of Literature
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, women's history
“(1892-1982) American novelist and short-story writer. For many years a resident of Europe, Barnes was the author of three experimental plays produced in 1919-1920 by the Provincetown Players: Three from the Earth, An Irish Triangle, and Kurzy from the Sea. Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936) are her best-known books. The latter, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, is an experimental novel dealing with the Parisian artistic underground. After the publication of Nightwood, however, Barnes became a recluse. She published only one play and two poems after this, the main reason for her lack of fame today; in her time, she was extremely influential. The Antiphon (1958) is a surrealistic play in blank verse. Her Selected Works appeared in 1962. In 1983, soon after her death, Smoke and Other Early Stories was published for the first time. Interviews (1985), a collection of newspaper and magazine conversations with celebrities presents forty portraits of varied people and is illustrated by Barnes’s own drawings.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“After sitting through the preview of a strikingly bad movie made by an independent producer, Tallulah observed, ‘What I don’t see is what that producer has got to be independent about.'”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
Zora Neale Hurston
World Tomorrow “How It Feels to be Colored Me”
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.”
Thurgood Marshall
Stanley v. Georgia (1969)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“(Born Miltona Mirkin Cade, 1939-1995): American short-story writer, novelist, and editor. Known as a writer and social activist, Bambara focused on issues of racial awareness and feminism. Her first, most widely read collection of stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972), depicts a young, sensitive black girl and her family and community as she grows up in a world of racial, sexual, and economic inequality. Her second collection, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), portrays the intense conflicts among people, especially women, involved in intimate relationships. Interested in black liberation and women’s movements during the 1970s, Bambara edited and contributed to The Black Women: An Anthology (1970), one of the early collections of feminist writing. Her novel, The Salt Eaters (1980), set in Claybourne, Georgia, deals with the recovery of the revolutionary community organizer Velma Henry from an attempted suicide.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand, I beat people up.”
Muhammad Ali
Quoted in N.Y. Times, 6 April 1977
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“1908-1960 American novelist. Born on a farm near Natchez, Mississippi, Wright, largely self-educated, began to write after he moved to Chicago in 1934. Often associated with Nelson Algren, James Farrell, and the Chicago realists, he wrote powerfully dramatic books exploring the ways in which blacks have been shaped and misshaped by white society. His first published work, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of four novellas, was followed by Native Son (1940), which became a minor classic and was made into a film in 1951 and again in 1986. Wright was a member of the Communist Party from 1932 to 1944, lived in Mexico for much of the 1940s, and moved to Paris in 1946, where he remained until his death. His autobiography, Black Boy appeared in 1945. Other works include The Outsider (1953), a philosophical novel; White Man, Listen! (1957); The Long Dream (1958), a novel; and Eight Men (1961), a collection of stories published posthumously, which contains some of his finest writing.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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